The Grand Cross
by swasdiva
Summary: Sometimes love is spun with the darkest threads. Kagome weaves a cocoon. Inuyasha x BloodPlus Crossover - Naraku/Kagome


The flashbacks are somewhat out of order, but I wrote them that way on purpose. Hope it's not too confusing. This is unbetaed. If anyone wants to proofread this and submit changes, you're more than welcome to do that. I accept crits, but not flames. I'll simply use those for more amazing metaphors like the ones below.

Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha or Blood + ...in this dimension.

_________

She remembered the night his eyes were brown.

It had become habit for her to watch his eyes burn embers in the candlelight, her fingers itching for a stick to stoke them. Not too long ago in her world, similar fires had boiled pots of ramen. She used to think those cloistered fires were so much safer than nights like these. She had kindled them for love, but it was taken with a thoughtless shrug, gulped down greedily and never shared.

But his fire she kindled without meaning to, while every night for as long as she'd been with him he had yet to demand a thing.

It was _that night_, as the incense coiled in silver threads, how he liked it, and the flames danced discreetly against the shoji screens, he had turned to her in the moonlight with a face she'd never met. By all appearances their story continued as usual; her lips open in song, fingers flitting on a shamisen; his pliant posture adjacent to the inn's open porch overlooking a mountain view, hands caressing a koto. He always watched her when she sang for him, always matched her rhythm with a discord that gave her chills, but the burn of his attention was different that night. She didn't shrink from it like she normally did, and he didn't flaunt its hunger.

Before she finally realized she was staring at _him_ for a change, she caught herself leaning forward, wanting his heat to come closer.

But he would do nothing without her command.

"Are you alright?" He asked her faintly, his voice subtle smoke.

She tensed, embarrassed to be caught in thrall, "Why do you ask me that?"

For a long time he didn't answer her, just let his question hang between them as a bridge between two bloods, for that's what they were and what they had always been, even if the roles were reversed. He was no longer exactly hanyou, and she, with the jewel pumping liquid power in her veins, was a creature without a name.

He pointed with a look. "You've stopped playing."

"Oh. Have I?" She blinked at her hands and tried to make them move across the strings, but they wouldn't listen. A weight fell over her, making her muscles feel weak and tender like it used to be when she had the flu, as if the simple act of using them required more effort than she could muster.

"I hope you haven't finished for the evening." Concern ebbed under his quiet answer.

Dismissing a wave of lightheadedness, she huffed, "I don't intend to, but the strings won't cooperate."

Something must've shifted outside, a branch in a breeze or a bird flying from its perch, because the moon's pallor crossed over his face like a spotlight, illuminating an expression so devoted she was sure it must've been painted on. It was then she noticed the clarity of his eyes, and the color, how warm it was, how dark. They were gentle, those eyes that were almost black, those eyes that should've been red.

The compulsion was strong to ask _him_ what happened, but a twinge inside kept her quiet. The pang crescendoed into unmitigated worry, and she would've panicked, wondering why she felt such a confounded thing if he hadn't stood abruptly and ghosted across the polished wood floor, sitting to curl behind her. Strong hands enveloped hers, guiding them into position on the shamisen and urging them to play.

"Cross your fingers over one another," he instructed, "Like this."

"You were always so much better than me." She teased.

"Nonsense," he bartered, but again that worry surfaced under her skin and she shivered. "What's wrong?" He whispered.

"I don't know what you mean." She plucked a sour note, cringed, and he stilled their hands.

"You feel unwell. Tell me what troubles you."

"I don't know, I - " A sharp pain lanced through her gut and strung her tighter than her instrument's strings. Suddenly the lure of his heat was all around her, dense and driving through her stomach with an intense need. He held her tightly, asking urgent, muffled questions she couldn't decipher, and the depth of his wordless voice lulled her into a haze, seducing her.

With a strength he hadn't witnessed since the day they fought their last battle, she shoved the shamisen away and pivoted in his arms, straddling him. He raised his face in surrender and she savored his shallow, splintered breaths bowing like a servant over her skin.

Fevered and sweating, her sickness twisted into desire and with the instruments spread across the floor their panting sang in chorus. He held himself completely still, yielding to her curious, questing lips. They experimented with his shoulder, leapt up to his jaw - biting a reminder of his own demise - then settled for the middle ground of his throat. It was there she'd wanted all along. Fangs peeked from her open mouth, and prodded by his plaintive sighs, she attached herself to his neck and drank his blood.

She imagined luminous brown eyes as she grew engorged with his body heat, painting them in wooded landscapes, then chopping them down to throw in a bonfire. She sang them in private songs that passed along folktales of love and wild things. She memorized them while her mouth drank their flavor, that bold, bitter tang that made her dream of winter nights in a warm kitchen with a hot cup of cocoa nestled in her hands. She drank them until she needed them, until she couldn't get the taste out of her mouth and felt its reminisce upon her tongue. She drank until she was fully aware of how rigid he was beneath her.

Sated, she dislodged her teeth, lapping at the spot until she gasped and watched in awe as the wound knit closed. She looked up to meet his gaze and was stuck dumb at the submission there. Something strange had passed between them. A part of her was horrified at her compulsions, but another recognized the ritual completion of a bond brewing since they fell together on _that day_.

Kagome knew in that moment, as she tenderly wiped the crusted blood from his skin and let him carry her to a bed they had not yet shared, he belonged to her forever. She had hoped, perhaps somewhat naively, forever would be a long, long time.

She remembered the night his eyes were brown, and how she claimed them as her own.

_________

She remembered the day he died.

Thinking her vulnerable, he had carried her away from the others in a suffocating cloud of miasma, ever the coward running from those who could actually kill him. But what Naraku didn't understand was that Kagome was the _only one_ who could kill him. He had forgotten her connection to the jewel.

"This is the last time you'll cross me, miko," he seethed.

"Likewise, asshole."

With a smug, thirsty chuckle, he'd completed the jewel with the fragments he'd stolen from everyone she loved, but being so close to her it left his hands immediately and slammed into her body, passing through the scar on her hip like water down her mouth. Quenched with a strange, satisfying power, she confidently tossed her bow aside and drew the nameless katana Sango had gifted her with from her village's arsenal, the orphaned weapons so much like cobweb covered headstones the slayer felt at least one deserved to be purified in Kagome's hands.

With her prayer in her grasp and an enraged snarl on his lips, the miko and hanyou began to fight.

It was wild and chaotic, graceless and frankly, pathetic to watch. They grunted and clawed, pulled hair and landed several swift kicks to the crotch, blood shooting everywhere, slicking the ground, neither unscathed. Eventually, they toppled over a cliff, but when Kagome awoke in the valley several hundred feet below she found herself without a scratch. Naraku's condition was almost tragic, his body bent in sickening angles, his face contorted in a grimace and gurgling out a death rattle as a crimson pool spread from behind his head. Gasping, she leaned over him, watching clinically to make sure he died, when in the last of his rage he grabbed her and bit through the skin of her jaw, tearing it off and mauling her face. He drank dredges of her blood as she screamed her shock, then tossed her aside with a crazed laugh.

He literally died laughing.

But then the tremors started.

Kagome stared at him thrashing on the ground, aghast and unaware that her own wound was already healing under her fingers. By the time he lay still her face was flawless.

When he revived, his demeanor was different. It was softer, strikingly more human. All he could do was stare at her, and the most unsettling thing was that his stare wasn't malicious at all. It was the childish look of a man caught with his crimes, of someone facing the gallows as the victim watched from the crowd. There was almost remorse in those eyes that still glowed like garnets.

She debated finishing him off, as vulnerable as he was. It was ironic, considering he wouldn't be in this predicament if he didn't assume the same about her. Something stayed her hand, in fact forced it down, so she acquiesced to her instincts and gazed at him softly, releasing him and getting up to walk away.

"Why won't you kill me?" he asked faintly, sounding ashamed.

"I...I don't know. I should, I guess, but I won't. Not today." She glanced back with a hard look. "That doesn't mean I can't. You know that now."

"Yes," he whispered, troubled, and looked back to stare at the clear sky.

She moved to leave and heard footsteps behind her. Slowly, she turned around. "Why are you following me?"

He frowned, but hesitated. "I...I don't know."

Taking a few steps forward, she could feel something like a tether pull taut in the space between them. She knew he spoke the truth. "Alright." She relented. "You can come, if you wish."

Astounded, he stood still for a few moments until she moved to walk away. He caught up with her and they left the valley, disappearing into the forest side by side.

Kagome discovered Naraku was either unwilling or unable to kill her, and she was alive many times because of his silent vigilance. After some time had passed she began to daydream about him, even when walking leisurely together in the sun or singing in their shadows, that he protected her as a samurai would, or a knight from the western fairytales of her childhood. She nearly laughed at that comparison. Only her knight could not slay the beast without destroying himself first.

She remembered the day he died, and how it made her life complete.

_________

She remembered the morning he became a father.

When they made love, his roughness returned, his frenzied wants and blind aggression, and when he'd bite her her blood flayed him, scorched him, leaving blistering welts and pain that pushed thorns through his veins. Sometimes she bit him back, enraptured with his growling screams, with the torture he inflicted on himself over and over again, and his blood resuscitated her.

She felt it when their come met inside her, when it mingled more intimately than they ever could, becoming a new living thing. She knew when the result of their bond fused to the lining of her womb, anchoring a piece of him to her flesh. She wasn't sure if he'd want to know, but he couldn't argue with her, so she gave him the news when he stirred against her back as the sun brimmed over the forest.

He didn't say much, but the change in his face was miraculous, and it was hard for her to imagine he had ever been anything more than a man wandering aimlessly, yearning for the jewel she gave him in her words. His devotion increased, if she surmised that was even possible, but he lost his focus on outside threats, consumed with his worry for her.

"Please promise me you'll be more careful next time." She reprimanded him quietly with a slight shove, although the fear from his near decapitation by a rampaging bear youkai beat staccato in her ribcage.

He squeezed her hand in reassurance, still covered in the bear's blood, giving her an answer she'd taught him herself. "I cross my heart."

They were attacked many times, for many different reasons. Some were quite crude, such as the band of thieves who challenged her knight for rights to "the pretty whore", a statement for which he cleaved too many of their limbs for a fair fight. Others were more cunning. While the Shikon's power had blazed a beacon miles wide, Kagome's power trickled out like dripping water, leaving a small trail of puddles that were just lasting enough to rouse curiosity and tease the desire for power.

One night they realized how organized and obsessive their enemies had become when a group of assassins, some demon, some human, all shadow, breached every defense of their encampment and surrounded them with ready swords and flashing teeth. They stared at each other for awhile, predators and prey churning a cauldron of ravenous fear, until an arrow sailed through a tight spot between a cat and a crow and thumped like a startled heart in Kagome's breast.

Raging, Naraku maneuvered her behind him, shoving her into the woods with the urge to _run_. His body changed as it always did when he fought for her, with black satin bat wings unfurling from his back, wide and spindly and ominous - the softest shelter she'd ever known - and his arms elongated into jagged planks of clawed wood, dark brown like his eyes, deformed as his tentacles used to be. It was those hands that always made her shudder, because something she'd once feared had become a pledge of his fielty to her. The fighting began, and she heard those final, unbridled death wails, but recognized none of them as his.

She hadn't gotten very far when she tripped on a root and crashed through some bushes, the arrow snapping at the base and shoving itself deeper inside her. Shaking uninhibitedly, she turned one last time and watched between the branches as he stared after her, bloodied and outnumbered with the assassins closing in, whispering a confession of love before his head was sliced clean from his body. Holding back a cry, she let him command her just this once, running so fast she was only a breeze through the night, and left his body behind to be devoured.

She remembered the morning he became a father, and how it left them empty handed.

These memories trailed her as she ran through the forest. She questioned how their threads became so tangled, how their stars became so crossed. She wondered if they deserved it. Perhaps some sins were not meant to be forgiven.

Kagome ran, not noticing the steady trickle of blood trailing down the length of her kimono from her chest past her feet, embroidering the grass with garnet beads, a thousand of his eyes protecting her path. The power of adrenaline shimmered under her skin, controlling her steps, until the jewel she'd become carried her to the outskirts of Inuyasha's forest.

How long had it been since she'd been there?

Word was the Shikon Miko had died the day Naraku vanished. Having not seen Inuyasha since her fall from the cliff, she'd figured he thought it true and decided, considering who she kept as a companion, it was for the best. She hoped he hadn't agonized too much.

Catching her breath and glancing to the right, she saw the well in the distance and ran to find refuge in the future. Her lover, her knight, the father of her child, was dead. Where else did she have to go?

A pain lanced through her like a chain around her ankle, dropping her to her knees and keeping her sanctuary just out of reach. The grass below her drowned in what she thought was mud, but it pooled from her heart to guard her, a mix of red and brown, fire and wood, too much surrender in that wet gaze.

She bent down to kiss those eyes she'd lost. "Please...please don't leave me."

Blood wept from her mouth. Unable to hold it back anymore, she cried for him, realizing as her vision swam she'd join him again soon.

She writhed and wailed. "My baby! Please...no..."

She couldn't succumb yet, not when she felt the new life struggling inside her. Their child deserved a chance, even if they didn't.

Tormented by a gust of wind, the boughs of Goshinboku waved for her attention. Although she grew dizzier as the ground liquefied between her fingers, she realized the great tree wasn't that far away. If she could make it to its shade, it would keep her safe and send her message to those who would save her child. The Goshinboku had always anchored her to the things she loved. It had always heard her prayers. It had never let her down.

Crawling, grunting, dying in a red river of the jewel's immortality, Kagome made her way home. When she reached the trunk she hoisted herself up on shaking arms and leaned her weight against the safe harbor of the ancient tree's solidity. The early rays of dawn flickered through the rustling leaves as they bent under the wind to hide her, and the sight and sound drew her back to those nights he played the koto and watched her sing, those nights she watched him become the man she was destined for.

Closing her eyes, she whispered, "Wait for me."

With that last wish she surrendered her body to their child, mummifying in seconds, offering it the shelter of a white chrysalis and subsisting on a tether of fresh spring bark to wait for its first breath.

Their child deserved that chance.

_________

He remembered the day he found a family.

Every week he made the short journey past the Goshinboku to the well, always peering inside with hope, despite that he knew it'd be empty. He wasn't there to mourn himself to death. Instead he came ritually to tend to its repairs. A lot could happen in 500 years, and stone wasn't always as strong and timeless as it looked.

Crystal was even more fragile. It could shatter with a touch and revolutionize the world's perceptions. Because he knew that better than anyone, when he found her opalescent shell under the boughs of the ancient tree he did nothing but shake and stare, smothering the urge to vomit.

At first he thought vandals had raided Midoriko's cave and managed to chip her statue from the glass mountain of demons, but she'd been embedded, hadn't she, so wouldn't it be impossible and absurd to hew something so painstakingly and then leave it forgotten in an open field?

Still, the face was just as tragic and beautiful, no matter that the closer he came the further his heart cowered from who he realized her to be. Nearly translucent, she finally looked how he'd always envisioned her, too pure to be a simple girl and too ethereal for him to be worthy.

Someone had been, though, because when he glanced down he saw the two cocoons wriggling in her womb as clear as day, glistening with the sickly, cottony gray of a spider's egg sack.

_'Sweet shit. Kagome...'_

Despite them being _cocoons_, he knew by the smell she was pregnant. She'd been alive all this time. She'd been in love...with _someone_..._something_...

Even though he wasn't the father, he hoped that was how it happened. He couldn't stomach the alternative, no matter the heady, stale road of blood mapping its way through the densest part of his forest, back to the truth. He could easily run after it if he wanted. He could fight for her vengeance, if just to assuage his own guilt at believing her gone, but with the broken look on her fragile face he knew she wouldn't want him to.

"Don't worry," he whispered, as if she could nod in agreement. He shook his head, nearly swaying on his feet. "I'll be right back."

Sprinting back to the village, he gathered Miroku and his adult children to help him tend to her body and extract the cocoons. As he gingerly lifted them out, they broke open within his hands, revealing two twin girls with caps of black hair, one blue-eyed, one brown, their auras a blurry, intoxicating mix of darkness and light as if the Shikon jewel was alive and split in half.

Inuyasha forgot to breathe. _'The jewel?'_

How long had it been since he'd thought of that?

Rings jingled behind him and the newborns squirmed and gurgled, turning their eyes in circles to find the sound. Inuyasha waited as the slow shuffle of aged feet made their way to stand a few inches from Kagome's husk. Clouded eyes squinted to study her features, and as the moments passed and the tiny girls cooed, tears carved out wrinkles on the widowed monk's weathered face. Miroku turned and looked at him with a pain so profound Inuyasha nearly fell apart.

"It seems to me," he whispered, "that you are destined to be caught between two beautiful women."

Blinking, the hanyou studied the infants nestled contentedly in his arms. The power of what he spent a better part of his life seeking pulsed through their veins. The beauty of what destroyed him offered itself up for another chance. He realized it didn't matter who or what these children were made of, but only that they were hers, and because of her devotion to the jewel and his constant but restrained love for her, because of their destiny entwined, he understood who was meant to protect them.

In that moment, when he made his silent promise, his heart rose up in the sky and splintered to dust, shooting to every direction, releasing his grief to the winds.

"Yeah, I guess so."

He remembered the day he found a family, but as Inuyasha raised two girls who both loved him unconditionally, he would never question how.

~fin~

_________

I play a lot with the chevalier term in this story. Chevalier is French for knight, but is also a rank in the Legion d'Honneur, an order established by Napoléon Bonaparte, of which The Grand Cross is the highest rank one can achieve. Since Saya's parentage is something quite cryptic, I thought this would be an interesting idea, to see how a miko and demon-thingie (in Naraku's case), combined with the Shikon's power, could cross to create a new species. Maybe you'll also notice that I purposefully place Naraku and Kagome in many situations reminiscent of Hagi and Saya: the string instruments, the fall from the cliff, the change in his body when he fights for her, and the confession of love before he "dies". (BTW, I know he doesn't really die at the end. Naraku on the other hand...yeah...)


End file.
